Why didn't I think of that? Father's Day GIF gem

I'm having trouble reading the news

BLM protesting the bump on the log in the hole at the bottom of the sea. See FBI chart.

Best explanation of the chart: The shooting death of a black man by a white police officer is NOT what drives BLM.

Exquisite detail. If Tolkien built model railroad scenery, this is how he would have done it.

This video is called "A Scenic Overhaul - Yorkshire Dales Model Railway"  I watched the grass grow and the road age with my jaw dropped.  I want to live in such a world, a sweeter one than this.

Genius solution: How to hug your embarrassed pre-teens in public.

Easy when they are little.
Takes a touch of genius
to carry it into middle school.

A friend's boys had reached a certain age. When Mom gave them a hug as she dropped them off to school, they were so embarrassed.  Her brilliant and simple solution was to tell them, "I need the hug.  Tell them your Mom needs it".   It worked and they hug her to this day as grown ups.
   

What's wrong with this picture? 001

This photo is a charmer and it is posed to look accidental.  I see only one cat has had a chance to take a lick.  That means the camera was at the ready.  The milk puddle doesn't look like any spill I ever made with far flung tiny drops in some direction.  Instead, it has neat boundaries as if carefully poured onto the floor.  The bright yellow mug is bone dry!  It was laid on its side to complete the composition.  Yet, I love the picture and the four creatures are doing something that comes naturally.  They aren't trying to lie to me.  But the photographer is deliberately making one thing look like another thing.

Government Isn't Big Enough! Doxxers, BLM, AntiFa and the Twitter Mobs are the Wild West, Beyond the Remit of Law.

Cheap social media create mobs that live outside the remit of Law and Order.   Congress and Parliament are not designed to rule these powerful flash alliances.   Congress and Parliament's response is measured in days and months while the challenges form up on the scale of hours and days.  The alliances occur within political parties and corporations and restaurant staffs and newsroom people.  They are becoming the first line of influence and power in our societies.  And they are the wild wild west that cowboy flicks told tales about.   The closest we have to a sheriff is Donald Trump.      Money always go where it gets the biggest result and these extra-judicial alliances are gaining wealth and the power to redistribute wealth.

Red China has made progress bringing this under control with millions of cameras, social scores for every individual.  These scores determine whether you can buy a plane or bus ticket even.  Closer to home, we have people in power who are falling in love with the prospect of doing the same, starting with instructions on how everyone should breathe and where they should walk, contact tracing software and who they should associate with in a time of Covid.   The CCP or Wuhan flu has motivated men and women who should love freedom but prefer power.

Grief is looking forward

Grieving isn't looking back, it's looking forward fruitlessly.
Being alive is being ready for what's next.

When someone you love isn't there anymore, the readiness to meet them is still there.
It's like a train that comes off its track.
The wreck goes on and on forward with the momentum of expectation
and meets nothing until, in time, the momentum subsides..

Did I hear that right? Black Americans Owe White Americans?

Compare the wealth of Black Americans who were brought to the US as slaves to the wealth of Black Africans who stayed behind and were not.      The amount those men and women lost by coming to America should be the reparations they are owed, plus some damages.  Except it's the other way around.  Black Americans would owe White Americans.

Thought developed by Dilbert's inventor, Scott Adams.

Of course there were millions of white slaves too, enslaved by North African Muslims in previous centuries.   These don't qualify for reparations because BLAME.  (Black Lives All Matter - Exclusively.)

Ikea jokes write themselves

I slept fine, you didn't.

With two in diapers, I remember thinking, "If it adds up to five hours, I can make it through the day."

Include Influenza A and B in Those Killer Flu Stats

I know older people terrified to go out on the street or to even sit close to a friend for a conversation.  They're afraid of COVID-19.   Part of the cure is to add back in the ignored deaths, the tens of thousands of mostly old people dying every winter from plain old garden variety killer flu.

CDC estimates for last year are 35.5 million got sick.
490,000 were hospitalized.
34,200 were killed by the flu.
The flu season is about five months long.
Roughing in the numbers, over 3000 on the average day were put into hospital and 200 were dropping dead every day.  And this, Gd help us, isn't even considered news!

In the chart below, COVID19 is included, accounting for the unexpected third peak this year.

CDC stats for all types of flu this winter
and previous years.

Grieving and Error 404

When the one you love dies, you grieve. But there's no there to go back to anymore.
Dialing up the past is the same as getting " Error Message:  That Page Does Not Exist". 
The one who is gone, who stopped, has changed you. The changed you continues.

George Floyd's Autopsy Shows No Life Threatening Injuries, No Neck Injury. But You Knew That. Read It For Yourself.

The mob and its agents have had no autopsy but George Floyd did and it is reproduced in full here.  That there was no neck injury but a load of drugs including fentanyl has no bearing on the mob.  That is just the evil spirit of the times egged on by evil men and women. some evil by intent, some by disposition.    The image shows the first two pages of the twenty page un-redacted report.

Deeper in the report you learn of serious heart issues.  (Arteriosclerotic heart disease, cardiomegaly and hypertension). You learn there were no petechiae present. (That means the little red dots that would be caused by strangulation). The medics the police called tried hard to save his life  and this is fully described.

                           
            Section 3: "No life-threatening                                            injuries identified". 
                                                            Fentanyl, meth and more









Hat tip to American Thinker.com
Nov2021  Autopsy link fixed.  h/t  L Griffin

Media Chases The Next Shiny Object To Get Trump Or Something

Man-Made Blood Cells With A Pocket For A Payload

This is pretty exciting.  Better-than-life red-blood cell imitations can be made in the lab.  They are hollow on the inside (that's the pocket) using some actual red blood cell (RBC) inputs for a scaffold and then later to complete the outer membrane.  The pocket can be loaded with medicines or even guide-able magnetic particles.  This isn't cheaper than blood transfusions but it creates a safe way to introduce useful RBC mimics into our bloodstream and give them specialized extra tasks.

The sequence:
Generic RBC are coated with silica for a base layer.
Polymers of different charges are painted onto this base layer.
The RBC scaffold and the silica layer are then scraped away leaving a flexible polymer layer with the exact dimpled shape of a red blood cell.

Picture sequence from Science Alert article

Then a membrane of RBC slurry is painted on top so the package will be labelled as friendly in the blood stream.  Having a real RBC coat, it can deliver oxygen to cells. Being hollow, it can be loaded with medicine and steered.  Being flexible, it can work its way through the same crannies a regular RBC faces, make the round trip to the heart and stay in the stream for weeks.

( I couldn't tell if the antigen surface of the RBC coat was specific for each blood type.  The research language uses the term "erythrocyte ghosts". A better informed reader can leave a note.)

Space News June 2020

SpaceX docks at ISS May 31st:  Private initiatives have got their nose out under the tent flap and see stars beckoning. Well, metal asteroids anyway. Capitalism with government subsidies got its first crack at going into outer space on May 30.  The SpaceX module delivered astronauts to the aging space lab from a U.S. base, instead of at $86 million per chair per launch being paid to Russia as per the last nine years.  The space story here is that at least one government, the American one, has got a little out of the way and  there will be good consequences.
       You can watch the launch here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyq_piGHKuY
And watch the link with the space station here:

Earth's magnetic field continues actively re-shaping.  The north pole moves dozens of kilometers in one year lately, requiring navigation updates all the time. It's actually close to the "real" north pole for the first time in my life   The new story is that an area of low magnetic flux in the South Atlantic is weakening and developing twin cores.  The South Atlantic Anomaly changes have been detected by a cluster of  Swarm satellites.
The Anomaly has been moving westwards about 19 kmph recently.  That's not "per year" but "per hour".The top speculation is that we are approaching one of earth's periodic reversals of magnetic poles.  The Daily Mail was all over this one for graphics.  There's a movie of the changing field at the link.   (The last polar flip was 780,000 years ago.





Every few weeks a meteorite from outside the solar system burns up in our atmosphere.  Here's a recent fireball track from May 19th.  Spaceweather.com posts a daily report from the NASA all-sky-cameras.  The straight blue line is the culprit, projecting where it would have gone if we hadn't been in the way.







Like a bump on a log in a hole in the bottom of the sea,  a speck of dust smaller than a mustard seed on a moon pebble has been analysed and The Creation of the Moon is being revealed in that speck.  A cubic zirconia crystal was found and measured.  It' formed about 4.3 billion years ago and this could only have happened in temperatures above 2300 C.  Those amazing temperatures would only have happened if that region of the moon's surface had turned molten.  The conclusion is that an immense and specific moon-rocking collision happened as part of the moon's story. The speculation is old but having a measurement is new. Today the moon is sedate with one side turned towards us, slowing its orbit by 1.5 milliseconds per century.



Near earth orbit is filling up with junk. The current cost of satellite junk cleanup is about the same as the cost of launching a new satellite.  This is an opportunity for a bureaucracy to tax new launches  (like a pop bottle deposit but a million times pricier)  and it's an opportunity for an entrepreneur to get filthy rich developing a cheaper clean-up business.


Four separate millisecond massive bursts of energy  (FRB = Fast Radio Burst) have been pin-pointed to the periphery of the galaxies they came from, eliminating a central black hole as the source.  From the Astrophysical Journal Letters, "Appears to rule out FRB progenitor models that invoke active galactic nuclei or free-floating cosmic strings."

Third Party Not Needed, Just Competition for the Uniparty.

From Sundance:

"Many people call for a third party in politics without realizing President Trump represents the first second party DC has seen in decades. That’s why he is opposed by both wings of the same legislative bird.   Both parties are deep in the pockets of Wall St multinationals."

Ocean Larvaceans as complex and airy as a thought: Particle flow filmed.

Stunning up-close underwater imagery of a life form new to me. (Ignore the sound track).
From Wikipedia:

Larvaceans (Class Appendicularia) are solitary, free-swimming tunicates found throughout the world's oceans. Like most tunicates, appendicularians are filter feeders. Unlike most other tunicates, they live in the pelagic zone, specifically in the upper sunlit portion of the ocean, or sometimes deeper. They are transparent planktonic animals, generally less than 1 cm (0.39 in) in body length,

Why I love Donald Trump

"Get any candidate ready, good or bad, I don't care, I'm endorsing. If you have a pulse, I"m with you!"

This riposte after Senator Murkowski said she may not support the reelection of President Donald Trump.